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Robert Duncan (1919
- 1988)
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 Selected
Poems by
Robert Duncan, Robert J. Bertholf (Editor)
This second edition of the late Robert Duncan's Selected
Poems, first published in 1993, includes eleven additional
poems and excerpts. Duncan, like Dante, was a poet of cosmic
imagination, intensely aware of his and poetry's role in the
ever-expanding logos of creation. His Selected Poems, first
published in 1993, is a "useful and portable
compilation," says critic Tom Clark, that "provides the
most comprehensive available look at the career of the Bay Area's
greatest lyric poet." Editor Robert J. Bertholf has enlarged
the original collection to include eleven additional poems and
excerpts. The second edition of the Selected Poems fully fleshes
out the retrospective of works chosen from the whole of Duncan's
writing life. From his early poems through his final Ground Work
volumes, as well as his serial poems, "Structures of
Rime" and "Passages," composed over the course of
thirty years, there emerges a prophetic voice of great perception.
 Young Robert Duncan - Portrait of the Poet As Homosexual in Society
by Ekbert Faas
A landmark work about a largely undocumented
period in American letters. Duncan's life during the 1930s and 40s
was among the first public prototypes of the homosexual writer in
America. He struggled to achieve artistic expression while
preserving his sexual identity. Cameo appearances are made by
other writers of the period including Nin, Henry Miller, Rexroth,
Pound and others.
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by Patricia Layman Bazezon, Academy of American
Poets
Excerpt:
Born in 1919 in Oakland, California, Robert
Duncan began writing poetry as a teenager in Bakersfield, when a
high school teacher encouraged his creative endeavors. In 1938,
after two years at University of California, Berkeley, Duncan
moved to New York and became involved in the downtown literary
coterie that had sprung up around Anais Nin...
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Prepared and Compiled by Cary Nelson
This site includes a Duncan's Life and Career,
On "Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow," On
"My Mother Would Be A Falconress," On "Up
Rising," On "The Torso," Duncan's Own Designs for
His Limited Edition Books, Duncan's Holography Publications, About
the Vietnam War, a Bibliography and external links.
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By Paul Christensen, Modern
American Poetry
Excerpt:
In 1938 he quit Berkeley presumably to attend
Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he visited briefly
and fled after a heated argument with faculty over the conduct of
the Spanish Civil War. He joined his male lover, an instructor
whom he had first met at Berkeley, in Philadelphia, but the
relationship suffered from the tensions of life "in the
closet" and ended after two years. It was the first of
several long-term relationships. From there Duncan wandered to
Woodstock, New York, to join a small commune run by James Cooney,
whose magazine, The Phoenix, was dedicated to the writings
of D. H. Lawrence. As assistant and contributor, Duncan came into
contact with Henry Miller (1891-1980), Anaïs Nin, and other
bohemians. Both Miller and Nin praised Duncan's early prose, but
his pagan lyrics soon offended Cooney's literary tastes...
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By Shawn Regan
Excerpt:
The complexity of source detail in Duncan is
quite vast; every plausible idea or utterance that came before him
including Dante, Whitman, James, Emerson, Freud, social
anthropologists and linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, as
well as so many of his contemporaries (Creeley, Zukofsky, Olson)
creates a living amalgam of the history of ideas fused into and
through the mouth of poetry...
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This site has a biography, links to photos,
audio recordings of poems, and much more.
Excerpt:
Robert Duncan played a significant role in
American literature during the twentieth century. In addition to
his accomplishments as a poet and intellectual, his presence was
felt across many facets of popular culture over a period of
several decades. Duncan’s name figures prominently in the
history of pre-Stonewall gay culture, in the emergence of bohemian
socialist communities of the 1930s and 40s, in the phenomenon of
the Beat Generation, in the cultural and political upheaval of the
1960s, as well as in occult and gnostic circles of the same era.
During the later part of his life his work came to be distributed
worldwide, and his influence as a poet is still evident today in
the arenas of both mainstream and avant-garde writing...
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Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
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